MANHATTAN (CN) — A retired top FBI counterintelligence agent pleaded guilty on Tuesday to conspiring to evade U.S. sanctions on behalf of a Russian billionaire who had previously been investigated by the bureau’s New York field office.
Charles McGonigal, a former special agent in charge of the FBI's counterintelligence division in New York, at first pleaded not guilty in connection with his conspiracy to gather opposition research for sanctioned billionaire Russian metals tycoon Oleg Deripaska.
Pursuant to the plea agreement McGonigal, who retired from the bureau in 2018, copped to a superseding information containing a lone charge of conspiracy to commit money laundering and violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act from the spring of 2021 through November 2021.
"My action was never intended to hurt the United States, the FBI, my family and my friends," he said Tuesday, reading from a prepared allocution note.
"I am deeply remorseful for it," he continued, standing at the defense table as he read.
McGonigal said he received $17,500 in concealed payments from a shell company's New Jersey bank account in 2021 to perform opposition research on Deripaska's rival, Vladimir Potanin. He described it as collecting "open-source derogatory information" on Potanin in an effort to get him on the United States sanctions list.
Potanin, the billionaire owner of a nickel giant, was dubbed "Russia's richest man" in 2021.
Prosecutors said evidence would show that McGonigal negotiated a fee between $650,000 and $3 million for looking for dirt on Deripaska's individual rivals and rival corporations.
The oligarch's payments were transferred from the Russian bank Gazprombank through an intermediary in Cyprus to the New Jersey bank account that ultimately paid the retired special agent, McGonigal explained.
The conspiracy count carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison and three years of supervised release.
U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams applauded the guilty plea.
“After his tenure as a high-level FBI official who supervised and participated in investigations of Russian oligarchs, Charles McGonigal has now admitted that he agreed to evade U.S. sanctions by providing services to one of those oligarchs, Oleg Deripaska," Williams wrote in a statement Tuesday afternoon. "This Office will continue to hold to account those who violate U.S. sanctions for their own financial benefit.”
U.S. District Judge Jennifer Rearden, a Biden appointee, set a sentencing date of Thursday, Dec. 14.
McGonigal, 55, was charged in the Southern District of New York in January with substantive counts of violations of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and counts of money laundering on behalf of the Russian businessman who was previously investigated by McGonigal’s counterintelligence unit at the bureau’s New York field office.
From August 2018 through and beyond his 2018 retirement from the agency, McGonigal violated U.S. law by agreeing to investigate a rival Russian oligarch in return for concealed payments from Deripaska, a Russian industrial magnate who was facing U.S. sanctions, according to the five-count indictment brought by the Department of Justice’s Public Corruption Unit.
Representing McGonigal at Tuesday's bail hearing was Seth DuCharme, an attorney at the Bracewell firm in midtown Manhattan. As a former prosecutor in the Eastern District of New York DuCharme oversaw cases against Sinaloa cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, sex-cult leader Keith Raniere and Chinese telecom giant Huawei.
McGonigal was separately charged in federal court in Washington with concealing at least $225,000 in cash he allegedly received from a former Albanian intelligence official while working for the FBI.
Deripaska, who made his money in the aluminum business, is a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin and was mentioned multiple times in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Former President Donald Trump eventually pardoned his 2016 campaign chair, Paul Manafort, after Mueller's investigation led to Manafort's conviction of eight financial crimes. Manafort's ties to Deripaska are well documented.
The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control — the body that administers sanctions after an executive order is issued — placed Deripaska on its “blocked persons list” in 2018. He later sued the Treasury Department over foreign sanctions imposed on his business dealings, describing himself in the complaint “as the “latest victim of this country’s political infighting and ongoing reaction to Russia’s purported interference” in the 2016 presidential election.
Deripaska says the move made his investments toxic, with his net worth dropping $7.5 billion once the Treasury Department put him on its blocked persons list. After his losses, Forbes now pegs Deripaska’s net worth at $3 billion. He calls himself the founder of aluminum manufacturing groups EN+ Group and United Company Rusal, mechanical engineering firm Russian Machines and auto conglomerate GAZ Group.
U.S. Treasury officials lifted sanctions in January 2019 against aluminum giant United Company Rusal, EuroSibEnergo and EN+ Group, a vertically integrated aluminum and power producer that owns more than 50% of Rusal.
Deripaska was once the richest person in Russia and the ninth-richest in the world before nearly losing nearly of all his fortune in 2008 due to crashing markets and substantial debts.
U.S. prosecutors charged but never arrested Deripaska in September 2022 for allegedly conspiring to violate U.S. sanctions and plotting to ensure his child was born in the United States.
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